[long] lots of problems, you did ask ... [was Re: RC1 stats]

[Alan Horkan <horkana tcd ie>]

> The diaWin  0.90.RC1 installer has been downloaded almost 3000 times so far.
> As there were no problems reported,

That is a lot of downloads.  I geuss i had better speak now then, i dont
have time to patch any of this myself.  i would appreciate if some of
these could be added to bugzilla, i will try and get around to it myself
at a later stage if no one esle adds them.

I am not really suprised that no problems were reported yet. I dont like
criticising open source projects, it is hard to be constructive and not to
bruise any egos or clash with mutually opposing ideas on how things should
be done (vi/emacs) and it usually require a lot of effort to make your bug
reports and suggestions clear and to the right people at the right time.
Filling in bugzilla reports or joining mailing lists are another barrier
and as a windows user i dont like the zealous hostility of some of the
people i encounter (although they invariably turn out not to be the
developers actually getting the real work done).  I understand that i dont
have the time or resources to fix any of these problems myself and it is
an open source volunteer project so please accept these criticims as they
are intended (constructive critism, or at least i hope so).

> I guess we have escaped dll hell
> (installation over previous versions) and possibly %HOME% hell (In this case
> I'm not so sure...)

The installer generates a batch file that sets the %HOME% variable every
time and then calls dia.  I think it would be much simpler to just add the
following line to the autoexec.bat file:
SET HOME=%windir%    REM Dia expects a Home variable.

This would permanently add the Home variable rather than using a
wrapper script every time and this is generally a hell of a lot simpler
(but ideally dia would fix this in the code).
I think we should use the windir rather than the program directory because
many programs put it there or in "%windir%/appication data".

The installer offers the install Types: Typical, Custom.  I think having a
type: Full would be very helpful.
(My mouse was broken and the installer does not provide adequate keyboard
navigation to set all the options without using the mouse.  This is an
inherant flaw, but it can be compensated for by adding a Full option).

The tree view is intersting, but i was also hoping/expecting to see the
new Preferences dialog and Hubert Figueres toolbar enhancement.

from looking at the installer script i dont understand why the Output path
keeps being changed rather than being used as a base location and
everthing else being out put relative to it.  (ask me to explain further
if i am not being clear, take a look at the script Abiword uses too)

i also dont understand why the installer script does not use a recursive
inlcude to add files to the directory rather than adding things
seperately.

The installer sets up a load of things in the context menu.
One them is obviously wrong:
C:\Program Files\dia\bin\dia.bat
and there are way too many of the others which are of the form
Create X,
where X is virtually all the export formats dia supports.
These should be trimmed back to about five of the most useful/commonly
used export formats and/or put into a "Convert to" submenu or something.

There is an alpha version of nsis2 available on the winamp forums.

> I was able to compile the .dll parts of dia about one year ago with mingw,
> but dia.exe did not work for some reason or the other. However, the dlls
> worked together with Hans' msvc dia.exe. Since then I didn't have any time to
> try it again.

at startup i get an error message in a dos window
syntax error
(which i geuss is an error in the batch file)
that window closes the splash screen shows and then another dos window
appears with the error message

** (dia.exe:4294447971): WARNING **: object_get_type(EML - Process)
returned NULL

** (dia.exe:4294447971): WARNING **: object_get_type(EML - Instantiation)
returned NULL

** (dia.exe:4294447971): WARNING **: object_get_type(EML - Interaction)
returned NULL

** (dia.exe:4294447971): WARNING **: object_get_type(EML - Interaction
(orthogonal)) returned NULL

I guess this means that the EML shapes are missing.


the fonts in the PDF manual dont look good at all.  The document does not
have links from the index to the relevant sections, or the nice structured
document features Acrobat calls bookmarks (effectively the same i think).

the html manual is great (it even uses the link tag and i get to use the
site navigation toolbar in mozilla :) so the problems is problems are
probably due to whatever software was used to generate them.

i was looking for documentation dia's command line arguements but was
unable to find any in the win32 version.
the local unix system had the man page,
dia [-h] [--help] [-e OUTPUT] [--export-to-ps=OUTPUT] files ... ]
but neither -h nor --help seem to work on windows.  (FYI abiword is using
popt to harmonise and make its command line arguements consistant across
platfroms and i realise win32 is a PITA in this regard).
if the man page is/were maintained as SMGL/DocBook it
should be possible to include a copy of it with the html documentation.

i was really hoping there would be a -nosplash option to disable the
splash screen.  The only use i can think of for a splash screen (besides
annoying marketing) is to assure the user (give visual feedback that) it
is loading the program is very slow to load.  Which follows on to my next
point.  I was doing some testing to see how robust dia was.  I deleted the
image dia_logo.png and this causes dia to fail to load, or at least stall
for quite a while.  A tiny window comes up with the message loading and
after quite a while the toolbox does eventually appear.

When i right click on a diagram and do not have an object selected i
expected the Diagram Properties dialog (which includes background
propeties) rather than an error message telling me i have not selected
anything.  Alternatively (but less useful) if all you are going to do is
tell me i have nothing seleceted then why not grey/gray out the Properties
menu item.

I like standard keybindings.  I like consistant keybindings.  I like
Ctrl+Modifier (or whatever platform specific command key+Modifier).
In RC1 Ctrl+W is bound to Save As.  I have never seen an application that
uses this keybinding, Ctrl+W is always bound to Close.  I can only
assume was an accident because of the proximity of Save As to Close.  To
put it politely this really irks me.
Show grid has been bound to G, (Ctrl+G is taken) which is inconsistant and
mildy confusing.

it still sucks that my laptop only has two buttons and i need to plugin a
mouse to access the middle button features.  maybe ctrl+rightclick to
emulate third button or perhaps someone knows of a workaround.

Most programs pay a lot of attention to the standard page size
(Letter/A4/whatever) but dia does not really seem to.  The default Zoom
and Grid size are quite large showing a page and half wide and really
large blocks.

I would suggest that the default zoom level should be what is currently
200%.  For most users i expect this would makes no difference (unless
people in industry have for very large diagrams i am unaware of)  but for
uses who want to print this keeps the diagrams closer to a page size,
rather than the current setup where my tendency is to draw very big
diagrams that take up many pages.  This would also require a smaller grid
size, in fact i think the grid size should be at least half (relative to
what) it currently is.  I also think the Grid should be more like graph
paper, with every group of ten being marked in a different color (ie light
blue grid with every block of ten using lightred/pink lines or whatever
color you prefer).  It would be great if dia could be set to
(centi)meters rather than inches based on my locale (but im geussing this
is another win32 flaw).

This is a really long message so unless you are respond to all or most of
it please change the subject line to try and describe approriately or
summarise what you want to say, as i really should be doing other more
immediate work.

Sincerely
Alan Horkan


Dia, Diagrams and Vector Graphics
http://www.lysator.liu.se/~alla/dia/

Gnome 2 Human Interface Guide (HIG)
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/

Open Source Word Processig for Everyone
http://abisource.com